Adjusting The Sails

Monday, May 27, 2013

Check out the following article from the NYTimes -

this method of individualizing medicines sounds very promising

in the fight against cancer (and other diseases)!

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/26/business/mice-as-stand-ins-in-the-fight-against-disease.html?pagewanted=all&_moc.semityn.www&moc.semityn.www&_r=0

Bev says they're doing it with her tumors, and (at least) one of the medicines has shown potential!

AND THAT'S WONDERFUL NEWS!!!

Last night was a rerun of the Rain program I thought I slept through the other night, but turns out that I really got to see virtually all of it. However, even the second time through I still didn't fully understand some of the concepts. Science has always been one of my weak points, which (surprise, surprise: NOT!) reminds me of a story! (If you've heard it before, I'm sorry!)

When I started college (in 1968), I was a math major. Northwestern's policy lumped Math and Science together, so it was no problem <G> for me to rack up enough math/science credits (even though I did eventually switch majors to Psychology.)

(notice how there's often a 'however' in my posts?) even though I graduated in 3 years instead of the usual 4 (by going summers), they changed the rules on me 'at the last minute' before graduation, saying that now we had to take at least one class of math AND science in that category.

So there I was, scrambling to find a science class I could pass! And there it was: Genetics for Non-Majors.

That sounded right up my alley; I figured it would be all about Mendel and his pea pods.

It was a 3-hour class that met every day, and was the only class I had that summer so I could give it my full attention. The first class started out innocently enough, with the structure of the cell. But before the first hour was over, I was completely lost. As in not even a GPS (had they been invented then) could have saved me.

Luckily for me, however, we were to be graded solely on class attendance and one research paper. So I sat there for 3 hours every day, not understanding a single thing the professor said (he may have been speaking Greek, or Chinese, or even some language I'd never even heard of!) What a waste of (my parents') money. When I saw Michael's notes from his pre-med genetics class, it became obvious that this was the exact same class; so much for gearing it to non-majors!)

I wrote my paper on Amniocentesis (a new procedure then, but one that we used when I was pregnant with Lisa in 1990), got an A on the paper, and thus an A in the class. (Whew! All's well that ends well!)